Prejudice
by Earthsangel01
Summary: He was everything she could ask for and more. She knew she was falling in love with him. She'd never felt this way before. In hindsight, that was probably what was making this so hard.


**A/N:** This story, for the most part, is in the POV of an OC.

The title of this fic used to be "Three Words" and it was broken up into 4 chapters. Now it is a oneshot, as I'd originally planned for it to be.

DISCLAIMER: I own nothing

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"I am a werewolf." 

Selina Lennings, a 7th year Gryffindor, was sitting on a desk in an empty classroom in one of the unused parts of Hogwarts. It was late in the evening, but her boyfriend of four months, Remus Lupin, had dragged her here to talk. Remus had only told her he needed to tell her something important in private.

"You're... You're..." Selina stuttered. Remus was the nicest, most caring person she knew. In the months they'd been dating, he had become an important part of her life. He was everything she could ask for in a boyfriend and more. She knew she was falling in love with him. She'd never felt this way before, never imagined feeling this way after only four months. In hindsight, this was probably what was making it so hard to process. "I'm sorry, I don't think I heard you right. What did you say?"

"I'm a werewolf."

Three words. Three words that flipped her world upside down. Three words was all it took. Just not the three words she might've expected. Eight letters. One eight letter word that changed everything she thought she knew. Werewolf.

Falling hurt.

Maybe it was just another prank... After all, Remus was a Marauder, no matter how often he came off as the studious type (which he was, to a point). Yes, that was it. It was all just a joke.

"I was bitten when I was a young child. I never expected to be able to attend Hogwarts at all, but then Dumbledore became headmaster-" He was serious. Oh Merlin, he wasn't joking.

Suddenly, her brain caught up with her body and she recoiled. She pulled her hands out of his grasp and stood. Without a word, she turned and left, silent tears streaming down her face.

She turned away before she could see the hurt on Remus' face. She would never see the heartbreak on his face or the pain and anguish in his eyes. She was gone.

♥ ♥ ♥

Selina walked into the Common Room to see Sirius Black, James Potter, and Peter Pettigrew sitting around the fire, talking. No one else was around since almost everyone had gone home for Christmas Break. The war was getting worse, and everyone wanted to spend time with their families. She, Lily Evans, and the Marauders were the only Gryffindors that had stayed at the castle.

She didn't bother to hide her tears as she walked over to them. They looked up at her in confusion.

She pushed her own feelings aside to do what she had to do. They were his best friends. They deserved to know the truth. They had the right to know what she now knew.

"Remus is a werewolf."

They just looked at her blankly, although the simple confusion on their faces was replaced with something that was strangely tense. She thought she saw surprise flash through each of their eyes, along with an array of other emotions that were gone too quickly for her to interpret. They almost seemed to be waiting for her to do something. _They must be in shock_, she decided, rather logically considering her emotions were running amok.

"He just told me." She continued. Finally, the blank looks began to clear. "I c-can't be-believe th-that I thought I was fa-falling in love with a... a mo-monster!"

She got the sentence out in a rush in between sobs. But the boys once again looked shocked. And this time, there was definitely something flashing in all three of their eyes.

"A monster...a monster?..." James Potter seemed incapable of forming a sentence.

Peter Pettigrew couldn't even form words. He looked like a goldfish out of water, the way he kept opening and closing his mouth. In any other situation, this would've elicited at least a smile of amusement, but not now. Selina didn't think she could remember how to smile if she tried.

"You can't believe..._you_ can't believe? _I_ can't believe that-that..." Sirius Black was the most coherent of the lot of them. He spoke in a cold voice that was very out of character of the boy that usually inhabited his body.

Now that she'd told them what she'd come to say and gotten enough of a reaction to know they'd heard her, she quickly turned away and ran up to her dormitory. She didn't want to break down completely in front of them and they obviously needed time to absorb this information about someone they had been living with for nearly seven years.

♥ ♥ ♥

If she had been thinking, she would have realized that Lily would be here; after all, it was after curfew and she hadn't been in the Common Room. Had she realized Lily would be in the dorm, she might have chosen to go to another year's dorm, one whose occupants were home with family. But maybe it was better that Lily was here.

She was very nearly hysterical by now, and some comfort might help.

"What happened? Are you alright? Did Remus..." Lily broke off as she began to cry harder. Lily began again quietly, trying not to make the crying girl worse. "Did... did you two... break up?"

Selina looked up, tears still coming nonstop. She looked at Lily and thought about what happened. _Really_ thought about it. Had they broken up? _**Well, after you ran away the way you did, I'd have to say yes, you did break up with him**_, a somewhat acerbic voice in her head told her.

"Am I a bad person?" she asked out loud. She hadn't thought she was prejudiced, but then, what had made her _recoil_ away from Remus? She had known him long enough to know he wouldn't hurt her, hadn't she? "Am I as bad as all of those pureblood maniacs?"

She didn't see the confused look on Lily's face as she continued arguing with herself. _You're not like them, you have many muggleborn friends. Take Lily, for example._ _**But I'm no better than them, just different**_, the small but scathing voice was back.

"You're not a bad person. You're sweet and kind, and a wonderful person in general. How can you even_ think _of yourself as one of those bigoted arses?" Lily was obviously trying to help, despite her confusion about her friend's current state. "What happened anyway?"

_Lily never was one to beat around the bush,_ she thought in a detached, wry way. What could she say? What had happened? _Other than finding out your boyfriend's a monster_, asked that voice in her head. _You shouldn't hide it from everyone. They need to know what he-it-Remus is._ Before the other voice could have a say, Selina spoke aloud.

"Remus is a werewolf!" The confusion cleared Lily's face for a second before it was replaced by something else. Something she may have recognized if Selina had looked into her eyes or even looked at her face. And yet, her face quickly went blank, as if she had decided to wait before making any judgements. All of this passed without Selina's notice. "I thought I was in love with him! I thought he was perfect for me! And now_ this!_ _What_ am I supposed to do _now_?"

"He's still Remus though, isn't he? He's still the same person. You just found out that there is another part of him, but that doesn't change who he is. He's still Remus, the boy you've been dating since term started." Lily just didn't seem to understand what she did.

"_He _is a _MONSTER_!" she all but yelled.

This time, though, she did catch the look on Lily's face. Surprise, shock, and worst of all, it was mingled with disgust. _**I **_**am **_**prejudiced. I am a bigoted ars**_- that, by now, distinctly bitter voice never stood a chance. _He tricked you. He made you believe he was something he wasn't. He made you think he was _human_! He..._ the voice was once again in control.

"And I'm going to make sure everyone knows that. They _should _know. It's wrong to keep something so dangerous a secret from people who are around it _everyday_!" Selina almost wished the small, caustic voice would come back. Maybe it was right. Maybe-

Selina would never know. The situation was taken out of her hands. Maybe that little voice, unlikely as it was, would have won. Most likely, even if it had won, nothing would have changed. It was too late for her, and she knew it. She was too set in her ways to change now. She wouldn't have been able to look Remus in the eye, even if she had realized that she was wrong.

If she could, she would most likely have thanked Lily Evans for taking the problem away. But as it was, she wouldn't even remember seeing Lily Evans or any of the Marauders that night. All she _would_ know was that she and Remus had broken up. She would never realize just how blissful she was in ignorance, just how much better it was for her to not know. Lily Evans had a way with Memory Charms.

♥ ♥ ♥

Lily knew Selina. Lily knew that she was from a pureblood family, but she had nothing against muggleborns; her family was anti-Voldemort. But apparently, werewolves didn't fall under her 'friendly' category.

If only she had more time to decide; just one more day would be enough. That would give Selina time to calm down at least a little. Then Lily could decide what to do by her reaction when she isn't hysterical. But term started tomorrow and the other students would be returning early the next morning.

Lily suddenly realized that she couldn't wait. If she was going to do something, she had to do it now. If Selina actually followed through and told everyone Remus' secret… well, she didn't even want to think of what would happen. She knew this- the last few months of school- was Remus' last chance to live a normal life. Once they left school, he would be thrown into a world full of prejudice, a world where hewould have to struggle to find _any _job at all, courtesy of the recent 'dark creature' laws, while everyone he knew moved onto bigger things.

But Remus wasn't the only one who'd be affected. Selina wouldn't be able to live with herself. Lily knew the girl to be a generally fair person and knew she almost prided herself on her open-mindedness. Simply knowing that she was so prejudiced that she couldn't even look at Remus the same anymore would have killed her. But knowing that she had gone so far as to tell everyone what he had kept secret for six painstaking years, that would be much worse. As soon as she regained her rationality and realized what she had done, the full effects of her actions probably would have killed her - literally. No, Lily didn't think Selina would consider suicide, but she had seen enough of the light in her eyes - the sparkle that made her Selina - disappear enough tonight, when she hadn't even realized what she had done.

No, Lily decided, she couldn't wait. She'd just do this carefully. First, she'd have to find out _exactly _what happened tonight. Then she could change as little as possible. She held her wand up, and after a moment's hesitation, she muttered the incantation. She watched as Remus took Selina to an empty classroom, as he talked to her, as Selina ran out of the classroom, as Selina talked to James, Sirius, and Peter, and, finally, as she came up to the dorm. Lily ended the spell here and thought about what _else _could have happened that would leave the same reactions in Remus, James, Sirius, Peter, and Selina herself.

Finally, Lily decided that the break-up would be both Selina and Remus' fault with the rest of the Marauders as a complication: Selina made Remus choose between her and his friends, and he chose his friends with hardly any hesitation. That would work as it left both Selina and Remus upset and the Marauders, who tended to be rather overprotective of each other, angry at Selina. The fact that Remus had disappeared with his friends on Christmas helped make this version of the night's events more plausible. What Selina did not need to know was that there had been a full moon that night. Lily would just leave herself out of the night all together, to simplify matters.

After she'd decides what she was going to change Selina's memories to, it was a simple matter of doing the charm itself. This charm, however, was more difficult than the more commonly used Memory Charm ("Obliviate" and voila, it's done), but Lily wasn't the best in Charms for nothing. Within ten minutes, Lily had put a girl to sleep, looked through her memories, and changed said memories.

♥ ♥ ♥

Lily went down to the Common Room to find the Marauders still in front of the fire, in nearly the same position as she'd just seen them in Selina's memory. She walked over to them and caught bits of what their conversation.

"…_believe_ that I actually thought she was good for him, that she was good at all!"

"…monster! Ha! She's the monster if she can't see…"

Good to know they'd gotten so far from the discussion they'd started when Selina had talked to them.

Before they began rehashing again, Lily cut in.

"It's all taken care of . As far as she knows, Remus broke up with her and werewolves are just the creatures we studied in Defense Against the Dark Arts class. Speaking of which, do any one of you know where he is?" At the panicked looks on their faces, Lily assumed that no, they did not.

They began to run toward the portrait hole. When Lily distinctly heard Peter ask, "Where do we start looking?", she decided to step in.

"Are you the bloody Marauders, or not? Don't you have that little scrap of paper that tells you where everyone in the castle is? You know, a _map_?!?" So she could have had a little more poise, but poise was overrated anyway, Lily thought irrelevantly.

The Marauders paused, looked at her, and started toward their dorm. Just as Lily was about to groan aloud in frustration (They were wasting time! How _could _they have not checked if Remus was alright? She knew he was rather sensitive about his 'furry little problem', as James called it, and this would have hit him hard), Peter pulled out his wand and Summoned the map to them.

With the map, they quickly located Remus and made their way to where he was, still in the empty classroom.

♥ ♥ ♥

_Late Summer - 1981_

Selina took a deep breath. She was so tired. Her eyelids were so heavy that she could barely keep her eyes open. The memories of her life had been flashing before her eyes for a while now. The reel was almost over now.

"I love you," she murmured softly, her voice strained to her own ears. She looked up into the pained eyes of the man standing the next to her bed, the man she had married, the man she loved. And quite suddenly, her mind went back to the first boy with whom she had fallen in love: Remus Lupin. She had seen him a couple of months ago, at the Leaky Cauldron. He'd been dressed in ragged clothes and had looked so tired. As far as she'd seen, he was with a somewhat shifty, young man with ginger hair who was smoking a cigar that had stunk up the entire pub. None of the other Marauders had been there.

Come to think of it, she had neither seen nor heard from Lily and James since the birth of their first child. Sirius Black had also disappeared around the same time. Peter Pettigrew she had seen until a few weeks ago. And then, there was nothing. Not only did she not hear from any of them, no one else seemed to know anything about their whereabouts either.

Suddenly, a memory popped into her head. However, this memory, unlike the others, seemed unfamiliar, yet there was a sense of déjà vu. She was with Remus and he was telling her that he… was a werewolf?!? She was in the Common Room and the other three Marauders were standing in front of her, stuttering. She was on her bed, and Lily Evans was talking to her. And then, she was looking down the end of Lily Evans' wand.

In that instant, a lot of things that had been confusing clicked into place. Now she understood why the Marauders had given her those glares. The way that Remus turned to Lily for support as often as to one of the Marauders in the month after their break up suddenly made perfect sense. Lily's seemingly overnight change from just another one of James' girlfriends - albeit a much more serious one - to an honorary Marauder could now very plausibly _have_ been overnight.

She didn't know if she was grateful to Lily or not. And at the moment, she really did not have the time to decide if ignorance really was blissful or not. Her eyelids were getting heavier.

She focused on the tiny, screaming bundle that her husband was holding. She would never get to see her little baby grow up. She knew this, and she accepted it- not that she really had a choice.

"Make sure she knows I loved her." she paused to take a deep breath- it felt like she there wasn't enough air in the room. "Make sure that she…that she isn't… prejudiced about…about anything."

She looked up at her husband and her little girl and smiled faintly now that she'd said what she needed to say.

♥ ♥ ♥

He watched as his wife smiled. He watched as the love of his life closed her eyes for the last time. And all he could do was hold the baby, the last thing she'd left him, closer to his heart.

He made sure to honor his wife's last requests. Their daughter would not be prejudiced. Rather she be unbiased to the point of eccentricity than be prejudiced.

And so she would grow up to be.

He made sure she knew her mother loved her.

He named her Luna, in honor of her mother, and he told her that her mother would always look over her.

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**A/N: **This is slightly AU at the end because Luna's mother is supposed to die when she was nine or ten (as ValorOrgulloso and ProperT both pointed out). 

This story was originally supposed to be more about the Marauders and their reactions from an OC's POV, but I decided to give my OC a name instead of using "she" throughout the story the way I'd planned. Unfortunately- maybe that's not the right word...Unexpectedly, Selina took over the limelight and this is the result.

For anyone who wants to know how naming my OC made her take over the plot of this story:

_Moon: the cause of all problems for a werewolf, ie Remus_

_Selina: derived from Selene, Greek goddess of the moon._

_Luna: name of the Earth's moon. (yes, I'm ignoring the fact that Luna is the Latin name for Selene)_

Anyone with anything that might help - please review! Anyone who's read this far - please review and tell me if this is good, bad, etc. Everyone with nothing to say - please review and leave me a smiley face or a frown-y (?) face depending on if you liked it or not!


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